Trying out Neovim and Zed
I was a VS Code user for last many years. Though it "just worked", it
started getting slower. It became too magical and too bundled. It became harder to configure and customise. I had too many plugins and I didn't know what was overriding what.
This is when I read about Zed. I liked their simplicity and speed. Zed provides very limited configuration options. This makes it easy to configure and understand what's happening.
Zed introduced me to the concepts of "tree-sitter" and "LSP":
- Tree-Sitter: is it a grammar parser. It tells what is a variable, what is a function, what is a comment, and this is then used for syntax highlighting.
- Language server protocol (LSP): this is responsible for linting, auto-completion, code lookups, definition jumping, auto-imports and other things. This is actually what makes our interaction with the languages easy.
Zed doesn't let us change the LSP. I also found their vim mode a bit patchy. That's when I started exploring Neovim.
Climbing the steep Neovim mountain
Using Zed has made me greedy for speed and curious for configuration. I think I can get my perfect code-editor if configure (Neo)vim right.
Vim already gives me 50% of what I want – a perfect vim-mode. Now I only want a few more things.
- Choose my own LSP (ruff-lsp, elixis-ls)
- Use Tree-Sitter
- Cmd+D for multiple cursors
- Cmd+p for fuzzy file search
- Cmd+shift+p for all menu options
I am still configuring my
init.lua file after 5 days. Each day I feel I am coming closer to my idle editor. And each day I discover a new rabbit-hole.- Day 1 went in getting and understanding the plug-in system - lazy.
- Day 2 went in adding lots of plugins for comments, indents, auto-close of tags and brackets. Though tiring, I liked this "do-one-thing-well" approach.
- Day 3 went in configuring LSPs. Elixir is working quite well now.
- Day 4 and 5 has gone into configuring LSPs for Python. I want to use
ruff-lspalong withpyright. I still haven't been able to get the two working without overlaps.
I am not sure if I am wasting time and will fallback to VS Code. Let's hope I am able to climb this Neovim peak.
EDIT: Update after a month
I found https://github.com/nvim-lua/kickstart.nvim package for Neovim. This has helped me the most in configuring Neovim.
Unlike other starter packages, it lets us build our own starter config. It teaches us how to configure instead of loading a pre-packaged config away from our sight.